Soldier's Game Read Online Free Page B

his head like some sick video loop. The final whistle blew and Ross walked off the far end of the pitch.
    “Come shake hands,” he heard Barry call, but Ross kept on walking. It wasn’t “sporting”, he knew, but he simply couldn’t bear facing Muir. He found a bench alongside the canal and changed out of the muddy boots.
    “Some luck,” he muttered.
    Crossing the bridge, he felt tempted to toss his kit bag over the side and forget football altogether.
    At Pat’s he called glumly at the open front door,“It’s me.”
    “You’re early,” she replied from the kitchen and came out into the hallway.
    “Is everything okay?”
    But before he could answer she spotted the muddy football boots hanging by their knotted laces over the top of his kit bag.
    “What are those?” she asked.
    Ross turned away. Pat reached out and yanked the kit bag from his shoulder. Her eyes flared in anger.
    “Have you been playing football in these?”
    “So what if I have?” Ross snapped back. “It’s just some old boots.”
    She stared at him for a moment in disbelief.
    “Maybe I was wrong to have trusted you,” she said, and then turned and walked back into the kitchen.
    Ross stood a moment alone in the hallway deep in regret. He then sighed and followed her. Pat stood at the sink with the boots on the draining board.
    “I’m sorry,” he muttered.
    “Put the gas on under that pot of milk,” she replied and began to fill the sink.
    Ross sat at the table and watched in silence as she used a wet cloth to carefully daub the mud and grassfrom the boots. Afterwards she stuffed the insides with crumpled newspaper and left them to dry by the radiator. By then the milk had boiled. She whisked two tall mugs of hot chocolate and sat down at the table opposite Ross.
    “Let me tell you something about those boots,” she said. “And your great-grandfather.”

5. The Perfect Fit
    A good pair of football boots did not come cheap in 1914 – especially not for a brewery worker with a family of four. Tom Jordan brought home less than two guineas a week from his job at Fountain Brewery. The few coins left over after expenses – rent, groceries, coal – went into a tea tin kept on a high shelf above the range. Here the family banked their savings for summer holidays by the sea at Dunbar.
    That first Saturday morning after Jack got his letter from Tynecastle, Tom retrieved the tin, but instead of depositing money he poured the contents out onto the kitchen table and counted out 25 shillings. Jack tried to protest; his old boots had at least another season’s wear. But Tom would not be persuaded.
    “I won’t have my son taking the pitch at Tynecastle in some ratty hand-me-downs.”
    “Jack Jordan Esq” – the letter had been addressed. It offered a six-month contract and had been signedby the manager himself, John McCartney. He had approached Jack after a match in which he’d scored three goals against Dalry Primrose.
    A gruff man in a bowler hat and three-piece suit, he handed Jack a card and said, “Come down to Gorgie Road for a chat.”
    Jack had been so dumbstruck that his father had to answer for him.
    “Certainly. Delighted, Mr McCartney.”
    To play for Hearts had been Jack’s one ambition since the age of seven when his father took him to his first match. Now at seventeen he was being offered a trial with the second team at centre forward. It seemed unreal, like a dream from which he’d soon wake up.
    Certainly no one would have predicted that Jack would one day play professional football. He had been a frail child, asthmatic and prone to chest infections. Many a night he spent tented under a blanket with a steaming kettle to ease his breathing. The doctor had told his mother, “He’ll never make a runner; hasn’t the lungs for it.”
    But despite such predictions and his parents’ worries, Jack did little but run. Among a gang of children he played tig and street football on thecobbled lanes and drying greens